Booktalk #1 : How I treat my books

Booktalk-Books and Me-Talking about Books

Hello and welcome to my new *feature*, where I talk about Books and Me or Me and Books. Let's be honest, this will be me basically rambling about various topics concerning books. So if you don't like my ramblings you can just skip this feature. If you have any suggestions of topics, or any topic-ideas you'd like me to ramble about, please let me know so in the comments or send me an email.

- Please excuse the bad quality of my pictures, I have no idea what is wrong with my camera.

How I treat my Books

Attention, this is not for the faint of heart. There's some serious book-abuse going on here!

How do I treat my books? Well, let's just say I don't treat them very nicely at all. I'm a serious book-abuser, I should go to book-prison for it. I'm really not kidding. Luckily my hardbacks fare a whole lot better than my paperbacks. The first thing I do when I start a new book is that I break the spine. Yes, you heard correctly. Sometimes I break the spine so hard that the book almost falls apart, and pages slipping out from my books is NOT an uncommon occurrence for me!

My poor poor paperbacks

The second book-crime I commit is that I very rarely use bookmarks. So, yeah, I'm guilty of dog-earing (is that even a word?) the pages of my books. If a book is lucky and I can't put it down then it won't have that many dog-ears, if not, well you can imagine how my books look like afterwards..tihiii..

Poor dog-eared book

Book-crime 2.5 - When I don't dog-ear my book-pages then, gasp, I put my books  opened on the floor. Yes, I do. And I do this on the floor beside my bed, so sometimes, gasp, I step on them when I get up in the middle of the night. Poor poor books!

Bad book-owner, bad

Book-crime number 3 - I not only mutilate my books with my own hands, nope, I also torture them with water, sand, filthy hands and beverages. I read my books on the beach, by the pool, in the bathtub (if I could figure out a way to read while I'm showering I would do that to). I eat while I read, fatty things like potato-chips, I drink while I read, things that stain, like coffee.

Unfortunate encounter with water

So, these are my book-crimes (I'm sure I forgot a few)..If you see a book on my shelf with an unbroken spine, no watermarks or other stains, then you can be sure I haven't read it and you should stay away from it because it's NOT a good book.
My books are my friends, I'm a serious re-reader, on a well-read book you can see all the years it has spent with me, every emotion I've gone through, they have aged with me.

So, how do you treat your books? Would you *hate* me if you met me in real-life and saw my bookshelves?